Through Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, the company provides ways to communicate with people across age, life experience and nationality, which is especially useful for diasporic populations trying to stay connected, as Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, told Vox.

I want to save it.”Īnd true enough, Facebook does serve some socially useful functions: Haugen, the whistle-blower, suggests that Facebook can still play a positive role in the world: “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote of her motives for leaking. It’s not just people whose salaries depend on believing this argument who believe it. We can do it again.” In defense of FacebookĪs “The Facebook Files” were being published, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, spoke on a podcast to defend the company, claiming its good works outweighed its sins: “Cars create way more value in the world than they destroyed,” he said. “We may need to slow down, but we’ve created democracies out of chaos before. “We need to stop handing off responsibility for maintaining public space to corporations and algorithms - and give it back to human beings,” she wrote.

Indeed, in 2019, Annalee Newitz argued in The Times that the time had come for social media to be replaced by some other medium of communication, much the same way that television was replaced by the internet. “But if we’re being honest, what they’re really proposing at that point is not really social media anymore.” “You see lots of people putting forth a hopeful idea of a new, humane social media platform to rescue us - one that respects privacy or is less algorithmically coercive,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, told Warzel. “The architecture of the social network - its algorithmic mandate of engagement over all else, the advantage it gives to divisive and emotionally manipulative content - will always produce more objectionable content at a dizzying scale,” he wrote. In an essay last year, my former colleague Charlie Warzel argued that such promises only work to obscure the platform’s fundamental incapacity for reform.

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